[Python-ideas] Associative arrays in hardware

[Greg Ewing]

Neil Toronto wrote:
> Full-on associative memory wouldn't be necessary. If there were a 
> machine-level instruction in current chips that did a dict-style lookup 
> almost as fast as a base+index*size,

But how would you make it that fast without some kind of
associative lookup hardware?

Without that, you'd just be implementing the Python dict
lookup algorithm in microcode, which might be a bit
faster, but not spectacularly so -- the same number of
memory accesses would still be needed.

-- 
Greg